Suquamish kids celebrate Earth Day with parade

Suquamish School students play drums to lead Monday's Earth Day Parade. LARRY STEAGALL / KITSAP SUN

SUQUAMISH - Led by drummers thumping on 5-gallon buckets, more than 400 Suquamish Elementary School students disguised as animals, plants and even a seashell-encrusted rock, marched Monday to the House of Awakened Culture in the school's third annual Earth Day Parade.

There were predators like Josie Jackson, whose mother crafted an owl costume for her with feathers made of brown and beige fabric scraps.

Plants like Annelise Bowser, also a fifth-grader, who transformed herself into a rhododendron bush by attaching pink and white tissue-paper flowers to a headband and shawl.

And there were whole ecosystems like fourth-grader Kayleigh Jackson's 2-foot-wide papier-mache boulder, modeled on a beach rock near her Indianola house. Jackson spray-painted her creation gray, crayoned an orange crab on the back and glued seashells onto it. A spiky blue rubber hat that made her look like a sea anemone topped off the ensemble.

Modeled on an 18-year-old Procession of the Species celebration that began in Olympia and has spread across the country, the parade brings the school and community together.

Suquamish resident Tanya LaBarre said she and her two young children try to go to the parade and program at the longhouse every year. "I think it's fantastic that the whole school does all this work to celebrate the earth," she said before the parade, as her 2-year-old son, Orion, exclaimed: "They're coming! They're coming!"

The local pageant underscores what many grades are studying, according to organizer and Suquamish Elementary librarian Jan Jackson, who dressed as a ladybug Monday with a red metal disc sled as her shell.

For example, many second-graders, who study sea life, wore paper hats with streamers that made them look like jellyfish. Others carried umbrellas with dangling green "seaweed."

Jacob-Brown, who carried a large Sasquatch mask in the parade, is a wood carver who specializes in masks. He taught the students how to create similar shapes in their creations by crimping, scoring, folding and curling paper and cardboard.

Emily Perlatti's third-, fourth- and fifth-grade class created a forest float after visiting Buck Lake on a field trip. The float was covered with cardboard trees, a blue bedsheet river and a waterfall of blue and white pompoms. Depending on whether they were going uphill or down, it took five to seven boys to drag, push and pull the heavy wooden platform along the half-mile parade route.

Perlatti, whose costume of green streamers and pink paper flowers mimicked the early-blooming beauty bush, said the annual celebration is another way to foster values like citizenship and global awareness in students.

It's also a chance to partner with the Suquamish Tribe. Tribal drummers greeted the children as they entered the cedar longhouse and Elder Rich Demain welcomed them with a message about taking care of the earth. "Everything we have we can thank Mother Earth for providing for us," he said.

During the program, kindergartners sang, "If you love our world, plant new trees …," and Tawnee Weisgarber's third-, fourth- and fifth-graders sang, "Predators and prey, producers and decay are in the food chain, uh, chain, chain," as the audience made claws out of their hands to be predators, then shrank back in fear as prey.

The students also honored custodian Thad Bayes for his help with the school's recycling and composting programs. Bayes said the school has gone from having two-thirds garbage and one-third recycling to one-third garbage and two-thirds recycling.

His message reminded the kids that the afternoon of fun has a serious purpose.

And Jackson stressed that thought, "You can't tell people too many times that taking care of the earth is a big important job that we need to be thinking about more than just on Earth Day."